Biosorbents are the natural origin adsorbents, which popularity in environmental engineering is steadily increasing due to their low price, ease of acquisition, and lack of the toxic properties. Presented research aimed to analyze the possibility of chemical modification of the straw, which is a characteristic waste in the Polish agriculture, to improve its biosorption properties with respect t...

An in vitro experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of methylcellulose on the attachment of major cellulolytic bacteria on rice straw and its digestibility. Rice straw was incubated with ruminal mixture with or without 0.1% methylcellulose (MC). The attachment of F. succinogenes, R. flavefaciens and R. albus populations on rice straw was measured using real-time PCR with specific primer...

To improve the surface wetting properties of rice straw, effects of distilled water and four alkali pretreatment on the straw surface wettability were analyzed. The straw surface contact angle at different time points was measured by JC2000A contact angle measuring apparatus, optical microscope (OM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) combined with a linear regression technique for parameter...

A solid state fermentation method was used to utilize wheat straw as substrates for citric acid production by using Aspergillus niger ATCC 9142. The Plackett Burman design (PBD) of experiments was used to test the relative importance of the variables affecting production such as moisture content, age of spore, inoculum size, initial pH of substrate, methanol conce...

An important issue in the use of expert sys­ tems is the so-called brittleness problem. Ex­ pert systems model only a limited part of the world. While the explicit management of uncertainty in expert systems mitigates the brittleness problem, it is still possible for a system to be used, unwittingly, in ways that the system is not prepared to address. Such a situation may be detected by the met...

The production of bioethanol, biohydrogen and biogas from wheat straw was investigated within a biorefinery framework. Initially, wheat straw was hydrothermally liberated to a cellulose rich fiber fraction and a hemicellulose rich liquid fraction (hydrolysate). Enzymatic hydrolysis and subsequent fermentation of cellulose yielded 0.41 g-ethanol/g-glucose, while dark fermentation of hydrolysate ...

Bamboo is a potential major bio-energy resource. Tests were carried out to compare and evaluate the property of bamboo and rice straw pellets, rice straw being the other main source of biomass solid fuel in China. All physical properties of untreated bamboo pellets (UBP), untreated rice straw pellets (URP), carbonized bamboo pellets (CBP), and carbonized rice straw pellets (CRP) met the require...

In arid and semi-arid areas, organic matter decomposition is stimulated by ultraviolet radiation. In this paper, the association between straw decomposition and UV-A exposure was evaluated. Oven-dried rice straw samples were chronically exposed to UV-A radiation and examined periodically for up to 90 days at room temperature. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that noticeable disintegrat...

In this study, the corn straw after removing the lignin was grafted with 2-acrylamido-2-methylpropanesulfonic acid (AMPS) to prepare sulfonated cellulose. The grafting copolymerization between the sulfonated cellulose and acrylic acid (AA) was performed using potassium persulfate and N,N1-methylenebisacrylamide as the initiator and crosslinking agent, respectively, to prepare corn straw-co-AMPS...